the website claims that the buran was superior to the U.S Shuttle . Can anybody confirm this ?
----
It was in terms of cargo capacity. You could say the US shuttle was more reusable because the Solid Rocket Boosters and main engines were reusable. The US orbiter is an integral part of its booster system, the Soviet orbiter was basically strapped on to an Energia rocket as payload.

Niether system was superior to the conventional rockets they were supposed to replace. They cost a great deal more per launch and the only real benefit they give is the ability to rendesvous with something in space and bring it back - and there are much cheaper and more effective means to get this capability if it is ever really needed. They were both boondoggles, and both space programs would have been much further along by now if niether had been built. NASA blind, and the Russians, also blind, followed what NASA was doing. When the blind lead the blind, both fall over a cliff.

I thought the only Buran was destroyed when the hanger it was in collasped due to high accumilation of snow? Was that why we couldn't use it while the US shuttle was grounded due to the Columbia accident?

The meaning of life is curiosity; we were put on this planet to explore opportunities.

Quoting Lehpron (Reply 9):Was that why we couldn't use it while the US shuttle was grounded due to the Columbia accident?

"We" couldn't use it after the Columbia accident because the prototype had been sitting in a Moscow park for about a decade. Such a contigency wasn't even seriously considered post-Columbia. The Buran never reached opperational status.

Quoting Alberchico (Reply 5):the website claims that the buran was superior to the U.S Shuttle . Can anybody confirm this ?

No cosmonauts ever even flew aboard Snowflake, or Snowstorm, or whatever Buran means, did they? Buran did have an advantage over the Shuttle in that it could be flown entirely by remote control. The Shuttle requires a crew.

Being as the USSR, with a then focused programme and with then less budgetary constraints and no overt political opposition struggled to make Buran operational, before the USSR imploded taking a large part of their space programme with it, I cannot imagine this long dormant programme coming back.

The last best chance was around 1992, when ESA finally dropped the vainglorious Hermes mini shuttle, they might have been minded to put some cash and maybe some help (avionic systems?) Russia's way to provide in a few years a alternate craft to the US Shuttle.

Buran was a terrible mistake, after the long delayed, technically fraught Soviet Manned Lunar programme, finally wound down in 1974, those who had fought hardest to achieve this, got what they wanted, a rival to the US Shuttle, which these Kremlin hard men had convinced themselves was some kind of orbital bomber, a first strike weapon against the USSR.
While Shuttle had military applications, these did not include being a weapon system itself.

Those in the Russian agency concerned with actual space exploration, who's worked on the Mir programme for example, were dismayed at Buran, seeing it as an unnecessary extravagance, they might have wanted an eventual Soyuz replacement, but something much more modest than Buran.
However, it is sad that the Energia vehicle was lost, that heavy lifter could have been very useful, considering NASA's apparent new commitment to exploration beyond Low Earth Orbit.

Just as an Information: at the moment the Testbed Buran 002 is sitting in the Desert in Bahrain. But the Spacecraft last year was sold to the Technik-Museum in Speyer, Germany (see: www.technik-museum.de) where it will be transported to during 2005.
The Buran 002 is the one used for the suborbital testflights (25 altogether) with separate engines.

Buran was a terrible mistake, after the long delayed, technically fraught Soviet Manned Lunar programme, finally wound down in 1974, those who had fought hardest to achieve this, got what they wanted, a rival to the US Shuttle, which these Kremlin hard men had convinced themselves was some kind of orbital bomber, a first strike weapon against the USSR.
While Shuttle had military applications, these did not include being a weapon system itself.
-----

This is true. The Soviets knew even back then that the promise of low-cost access to space through the "reusable" shuttle was a pile of bull. They thought it was just a cover, and that the shuttle's primary purpose was military. They gave us way to much credit. NASA really believed its own bull. When this became clear to everyone, it was to late and the damage had already been done. Both space programs stagnated as money fell into the shuttle sinkhole and competition died down.

I'm not sure exactly how many Buran protytpes there were, but I've heard that if you count those that weren't completed it could have been as many as ten.

I visited one of them in (?) 1998 or 1999 on a school trip to Moscow: one of them is in Gorky (?) Park right beside the River Moskva, and there is a fairly lame space 'simulator' inside. One of the female attendants was particularly sniffed at my schoolboy question as to why Buran looked so much like the American shuttle.

Her responce was along the lines of: "It's a space shuttle, space shuttles look like this..."

Memories of Concordski... a potentially superior lookalike that never had the chance.

I don´t think the Buran was a mistake, no Buran, no AN-225.
As far as it´s result, 2 orbits and pretty burnt when landing by remote controll, 50cm from the center line on the landing strip...
-----

Do you realize what could have been done with the money spent on Buran had it been spent wisely? Yes, the AN-225 looks cool. As does the Buran itself. But having a Mir as big as the fully built ISS, or even a manned trip to Mars, would have been better. The Shuttle should have been a game ending mistake for us in space. The Russians would be calling all the shots in space had they not followed our folly. And there would be plenty left to build a jumbo cargo plane, if thats what interests you.